Study On Carrier’s Return-Order-Accepting Strategy Under Demand Uncertainty

In recent years,online freight platforms have developed rapidly in our country.With the expansion of bilateral users and the enhancement of platform functions,they have injected new vitality into our national road transportation market.The widespread use of online freight platforms has brought new order acquisition channels for carriers.The centralized order information enables carriers to better understand the needs of the market and to make choices from more orders based on standardized information.At the same time,order booking has become an effective way to solve small-scale carriers’ empty-load problem.It can improve the using efficiency of transportation resources by reducing the waste of carriers’ waiting time and unnecessary driving distance.However,there still exists a lack of research on the ordering strategies for carriers in such specific scenarios of online freight platforms.Focusing on carriers’ choices of return orders from online freight platforms,this article first analyzes the market environment and transaction mode of the online freight platforms.And the factors which may affect carrier’s return transportation costs and benefits are explored with assessment of one platform’s real data.Then a mathematical model of carriers’ return transportation profit is provided.Next,the carriers’ four possible decision-making strategies for order acceptance are put forward in this paper,and the best decisions which could reach the carrier’s expected profit maximization are proposed.At last,the influences of external environmental factors and information update cycles on the carrier’s profit are further discussed as well as the decision-making strategies.Some innovation points of this paper are listed as follow:(1)It discusses the cost and benefit of return transportation from the perspective of individual carriers,and establishes the profit model according to actual operating data.(2)It transforms the decision-making problem into a problem of order "threshold" by building the relationship between profits and threshold standards,and explores the expected profit of carriers driven by different strategies and provides decision-making suggestions.(3)It explores the corresponding changes of the profit results under the change of market conditions and explores the differences of each strategy in different environments.The research of this paper finds out that the carriers can obtain higher expected profit by considering multiple factors than by considering a single factor;and the carriers can obtain higher expected profit than considering direct information while making reasonable estimates of final profit based on the known information.The influence of external factors on the expected profit results is related to the complexity of considered information based on the carrier’s decision-making process.This article considers for the first time the strategies for road carriers’ order acceptance of return transportation under the background of online freight platforms.With the consideration of actual business scenario of online platforms,the generating process of costs and benefits is discussed.And a profit model is improved with analysis of the actual transaction data of the platform.Considering the expected profit results brought by the different decision-making preferences of the carriers under the condition of demand uncertainty,the decision-making suggestions for accepting return transportation orders are put forward.The research results of this article can enrich the study of the online freight platforms,and can provide a theoretical basis for decision-making of individual carriers under the changing market environment of online freight platforms.